Athena's Myrmidon

Super proud of my project, please have a look at my final renders!

Last update because following this will be my official submission renders for the competition (also bitter sweet cause this is ending tomorrow, but super excited to apply the things I have learnt throughout this process to my future work and projects!).

Anyways, today I worked on the skin, after debating with myself for a while, I decided to go with a molten lava, similar to one of the titan from the Disney Hercules movie. 

After I was happy with the skin, which took a while because of the random noise and displacement kept messing up the mesh and yielding something that I was not happy with, I finally got that through and moved onto scratches.

For my scratches, I made sure to have a lava texture fill layer below before painting the scratches because I want the scratches to reveal bubbling lava from the skin, replicating a wound.

Today's update is really exciting but also, a lot of change has happened since last update (aka from last night till this arvo).

With the original design that I did for Athena's face, I didn't really like the outcome of it that much and how it looks on the chestplate so I decided to revamp it and went with the wings that I originally drawn on my sketchbook from the first day. 

To make the wing, I went with stacking multiple feather layers on top of one another to get the thickness of an angel wing similar to how I imagined, as well as similar to the reference picture that I used. 

After long hours of drawing golden feathers, I finally got my result that I am happy with, as well as experimenting with the base.

With the armour finished, the next update should be the last (I think?), my next step should be finalising the base and trying to get a molten skin effect (like the titans from Greek myths) for my myrmidon, as well as atmospheric lighting, and extra details for the armour like scratches and such to tell a story through my work.

Silly me, I have not noticed the update button on the site and have been editing the same update since (haha).

Anyway, a lot of work has been done since the last update, my back and neck is screaming in pain but the result of today's experimentation and progress is something I'm proud of.

I first started with adding the armoured kilt/skirt (something along that line, I did a lot of googling but couldn't find out the actual name of the thingo).

I then proceeded to finish touching up the armguards snakes, with the snakes, initially I want to make it so that the snake's head protrudes out from the armguards in a pyramid-like stucture so that you can view the eyes from the front, and after tinkering a bit and found out that if I add another height map on top of my already-made height map before, I could essentially manipulate a certain area by only creating a mask of such areas, and this led to having the snake heads appear as I wanted. This discovery will later lead to something better

Using duplicated height maps techniques that I found out, I thought to myself to why am I restricting the height map by using the paint-along tool while I could use the normal paint tool, change the opacity similar to how I would blend colours when painting digitally to ease in the transition of the map.

Using such techniques, I then did detailed painting of Athena's face and helm to make her face really stands out with more depth. as if her face was brought forth from the armour when it was being made.

This is my first Rookies contest and something I want to push myself doing to add to my portfolio as I am graduating in a year. 

I am super excited when ideaing this concept of a knight, but being me and being super interested in Greek myths, I cannot pass up this chance to make a Greek knight (?), which later through research I found out there are Myrmidons, so here is myt first step gathering reference pictures for my design!

After gathering all those cool Greek armour set pictures (or radiating Greek myths vibe), I grabbed my sketchbook and began jotting down some sketches. 

I am particularly drawn to having a goddess face featured on the chestplate as what people did in the ancient Greek myths that I read about, in order to ask the god/ goddess for blessings in combat. Since this is an armour set for combat as mentioned, I decided to choose the goddess Athena to feature on the chestplate. 

My sketches focused on exploring the orientation and how I plan to present Athena's face onto the chestplate and what to surround her with. I also explored a lot of armour patterns/ decorations and was particularly drawn to the golden floral/ vegetations edges and spent time exploring that detail. 

After research and exploring by sketching, I went and finalised the concept.

Lots of progress done since I last updated, I began texturing and going back and forth between actually doing the texturing and watching youtube videos on how to get the effect/ texture I wanted. Have to say that the Meet Mat 3 Youtube series is a gem, learnt heaps of new things that I applied to my work.

Right now, my knowledge of height map is minimal and not to the point where I could masterfully manipulate it to my liking but after tinkering around a bit, I found out a trick by using blur and levels map on black masks to create mesh displacement (I think it is that but I'm not entirely sure), however, I did manage to get the beak to pop out, so now the helmet really looks like an owl's face.

Putting folden rims around the body armour, arm guards and the greaves was really fun because the final result turned out pretty satisfying for me.